St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans. Gore Charles

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ uses the expression not as equivalent to 'by their own unassisted powers, without the help of God,' but simply to mean 'without the help of any special revelation[11].'

      Universally then, according to St. Paul, two sources of the knowledge of God exist; nature, with its evidences of the divine power and other similar attributes, and conscience, with its witness to divine righteousness. And, though the sciences of nature and man have grown since St. Paul's day past recognition, nothing (we may boldly say) has really weakened either element of this double witness. It is, and remains true, that the only reasonable argument from the universal order of nature is to a universal reason or mind: and that the method by which the moral conscience may be believed to have developed out of 'animal intelligence,' makes no difference as to the cogency of its witness to a divine righteousness, in response to which alone it could have developed as in fact it has done. It is worth notice also before we leave this part of our subject, that St. Paul's line of thought affords a true explanation of the double fact that, on the one hand, the actual moral standards with which the conscience of different individuals, races, and generations is satisfied, greatly varies; and, on the other hand, that all the standards tend towards unity in a common idea of righteousness. The tendency towards unity St. Paul would attribute to the divine righteousness which lies behind conscience and which it exists to reflect. The variations would be due to the different degrees of development reached; or still more to the different degrees of faithfulness or unfaithfulness, attention or inattention, with which the conscience of the race or the individual has responded to the light. The conscience, like the speculative reason, is an instrument for coming to the truth; but an instrument capable of every variety of racial or individual error or obtuseness.

3. It appears clearly enough in this chapter, that St. Paul's doctrines of free grace and justification by faith must be grossly and carelessly misconceived unless they are viewed upon a deep background of what we commonly call 'natural religion,' that is (practically) the religion that appeals straight off to the conscience of almost all honest and civilized men. It is 'natural religion' to believe that God will judge men with absolute power and insight and impartiality according to their conduct and their characters: that there can be no 'making believe,' no substitute for a good character, and no escaping with a bad one. The prophets are full of this principle. Our Lord reasserts it. It is emphasized by St. James, whose plain point is that we are justified not by right belief (which is what he means by 'faith'), but by a good life. But no one could assert the principle more simply and absolutely as the basis of all his special evangelical teaching than St. Paul. And whatever is true about free grace and justification by faith only, is true because, and only because, this free grace and this justifying faith are necessary means or steps towards the realization of actual righteousness. So St. Paul states it—'that the requirement of the (divine) law might be fulfilled in us who walk[12]' according to the principles of the 'gospel of the grace of God.' The doctrine of grace is rooted and based upon the truths of natural religion, and leads up to their realization. It has been then a most perilous mistake when missionaries have preached the doctrines of grace and redemption in regions where there had been no preparatory training in natural religion—in the truth of the unity and power and moral character of God: of the reality of our responsibility towards Him: of His inexorable holiness: of His inaccessibility to any kind of bribe or attempt to find some substitute for moral obedience. Men must have known what it is to tremble in the recesses of their being 'as guilty men surprised' before God's awful righteousness; to 'tremble,' like Felix, at the message of 'righteousness, temperance, and judgement to come,' before they can safely learn the lesson of His grace and pardon.

      And there are two minor elements in natural religion, as commonly understood, for which St. Paul here makes himself responsible. It has been generally understood that all men instinctively desire their own happiness, and that this is natural and right; and that as we should reasonably prefer our more permanent and deeper good to what is only transitory and superficial, so we should strive for the happiness and satisfaction which is eternal—the eternal reward, which only the stern pursuit of virtue can obtain for us. This deep desire for our own substantial happiness our Lord sanctions and continually suggests as a principal motive for right living. The love of others does not annihilate it. 'Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.' So then St. Paul also, following his Master, recognizes it as lying at the heart of what is right and true in mankind, that we should 'seek' for ourselves 'glory, honour, and incorruption'—the glory and honour which abide eternally. It is plain that he would have us pay no heed to that truly unnatural modern altruism which would disparage and depreciate this motive of a right self-love, and which would treat the desire for eternal happiness, and fear of eternal loss, as a base and unworthy element in religion. No doubt it is not the only motive. It is not even the characteristically Christian motive. But it is a natural and legitimate motive all the same. It is an inextinguishable consciousness in us that we were meant for blessedness.

      But, once more, the only true happiness is moral happiness: it is a 'glory and honour' springing out of the man's character and belonging to it: it is a happiness that is in this sense deserved. True, the servant of God in heaven will always feel that what he is receiving is infinitely beyond his deserts, and that his deserts are what God has wrought in him, not he himself. None the less the reward springs out of and belongs to what God has actually made him to be. Heaven is not a happy place in such a sense that we could be made happy by being 'put there' by an arbitrary fiat of God. It is fellowship with God, the All-holy; and God's holiness is intolerable, it is 'devouring fire and everlasting burnings,' to those who are not morally like Him. Here lies the reason why a heaven is not possible to moral beings without the accompanying possibilities of a hell. For the moral possibility of acquiring the holy character involves the opposite moral possibility: and it does not lie in the moral nature of things that the bad character should receive anything except what it deserves—the 'indignation and wrath' which God, because He is God, must express towards the sinful, wilful character, and which to the character itself means 'tribulation and anguish.' This, St. Paul says positively, must be the lot of 'every soul of man that doeth evil.' It is this inevitably two-sided law that a large part of the kindly-disposed world to-day are trying to get rid of, or to forget, on its severe and dark side. But it is in fact a law that works even more necessarily and inexorably than physical laws, inasmuch as it is the expression of God's necessary moral being. God cannot 'let us off' the punishment of our sins, which is only their inevitable fruit. Nor does He disclose to us any necessary limit to the ruin which we may work in our being. This stern principle of natural religion is taken up into, and indeed intensified in, the gospel. St. Paul, however, neither here nor elsewhere uses 'immortality' to describe the future state of those whom God condemns. He uses it only of God and of those who enjoy the vision of God. The 'immortality of the soul'—the idea that every soul as such necessarily and consciously exists to all eternity—is an idea which the language of Scripture does not seem to warrant.

      4. There are also two less prominent points in the second chapter that we must not entirely pass over.

St. Paul, we should find, if we were to investigate the matter, is wholly true in his interpretation of the Old Testament in general. He interprets its spirit and meaning with perfect insight. But he is not always what we should call critically exact, any more than the other interpreters of his day, in his use of particular texts. Thus, in this chapter he gives to some words of Isaiah[13] a meaning which is indeed to be found elsewhere in the prophets[14], but does not really belong to the original of this particular passage. Isaiah is saying that God's name is being blasphemed by the oppressors of Israel—'Continually all day long my name is blasphemed.' But the Greek version of the Bible inserted the words 'through you' (the Jews[15]); and St. Paul interprets this insertion to mean that it was the moral inconsistency of the chosen people themselves which caused God's name to be blasphemed. Perhaps the fact that he uses the formula of quotation 'as it is written' after the words referred to, is СКАЧАТЬ